Mobile Radio Access Networks (RANs) increasingly rely on high capacity wide area transport networks to interconnect mobile transceivers and baseband processing resources. Transmitting data across a wired network, such as a fiber network allows for high capacity and high speed data transmission. Unfortunately, wired networks may be limited in geographical reach and often require high costs to build and operate. Wireless networks allow for data transmission into locales where wired networks are unavailable. Wireless networks are bandwidth limited and thus do not currently provide the data transmission capacity and velocity afforded by wired networks. An elegant solution to increasing the data transmission capacity and velocity between wireless network transceivers is provided in French Patent Number 1254139, which describes the separation of traffic data between fronthaul signals, control protocol data and user data flow.
What is needed are wide area transport networks that comprise both wired and wireless network segments. Further, these wide area transport networks should allow for selective transmission of fronthaul data flow in either multiplexed or demultiplexed forms depending on performance aspects (e.g., key performance indicators) of network segments of the mobile wireless network.